Best format for uploading stories?

[Toxix]

What’s the best format for uploading stories to this site? The three main ones I see are pdf, word document, and plain text (which I don’t even know how to upload). Which of these is the best in terms of readability and making a story more popular?

[Raynebow]

Msword and RTF seem to be the way to go when it comes to uploading words! PDF is a popular format due to the ease of uploading it, but has the problem of needing to be downloaded to view on mobile and other sources. The previous two don't have that problem, and plain text tends to be a bit... unflattering? Comes down to personal preference in the end, but I'd heavily advise against pdf uploads!

[hernextmeal]

Plain text is by far the easiest to read due to being compatible with reader mode. Just make sure you are saving in utf-8 encoding or it will screw up quotation marks. The downside is no formatting, but most stories don't use that.

PDF: either second best or dead last. If you pick a reasonable (ie. 14pt or larger) font and paper size (A5 or A6) it can read quite well even on mobile. If you just use the default of 8-10 pt on letter everyone will have to squint or set zoom to 300 and drag around the page. Most people do the latter which makes most PDFs on the site very painful. Auto prompts to download on mobile.

RTF and Word 2003: The site will convert it to html and display it in an iframe. It does a reasonable job of preserving formatting but it will be stuck in a little box making it painful to read on mobile (and desktop too tbh) without downloading manually. On Android, the default viewer does not natively support these formats and will make you upload them to Google for conversion so you can view it - some people might not want their smut on Google servers.

ODT and Word 2007+: The site will convert it to html and display it in an iframe. It does a horrible job converting the formatting. It will be stuck in a little box making it painful to read on mobile (and desktop too tbh) without downloading manually. Android at least can view these when downloaded without connecting to Google services.

Tbh I wish the site would modernize the format conversion/viewing. Right now I have to download anything I want to read without poking my eyes out, even on desktop, aside from the rare plain text upload that doesn't have encoding issues. I'd recommend they use pandoc instead of the ancient version of the OpenOffice CLI they currently use, convert to markdown, and display it inline like is currently done for plaintext, except with smarter margins. But it still beats Twitter lmao.

[DoubleOSnake]

I go with PDF, but with a link in the description to a version that (I hope) is better readable on Mobile.

[HedoroMonogatari]

I'm a big fan of RTF! I did a bit of experimenting with my first post. Docx and Doc were my first tries and both came out terrible! I can't stand how they don't fit correctly in the reading box. That makes it a no go for me, personally, and I almost can't bring myself to read a story if it's in that format on this site! RTF fits absolutely perfect, and it's what I'll be using from now on. It can be a bit weird on desktop if you have a large monitor, but you can simply resize the window and it'll fit to the size no matter what, no need to scroll left or right! I mostly read on mobile with this site, so I like how RTF fits my phone screen.

PDF is okay. If you have a big story with a lot of formatting, it makes sense to upload PDF, however mobile readers are forced to download and that can be a deal breaker for me, so I assume others may feel the same. On occasion, I do risk a download, but usually I'll just copy and paste the story from desktop and then send the plain text to myself lol.

[KittyBoi]

I tend to use .docx here for ease of use, since it maintains the specific formatting of my work and doesn't jam it up. Now, over on FurAffinity, which is a secondary repository, I tend to use .pdf since people have to download it anyways (with the caveat that I also post the full text of shorter stories in the description to mitigate that.

I have never been able to get .txt or .rtf to work in a way that looks attractive or coherent to me, though I don't doubt that it's possible.

[Cruich]

While RTF sometimes fails to upload, and .docx sometimes has display issues, the old .doc format has never failed me, has no formatting issues (does not trigger a horizontal scrollbar), and displays beautifully on mobile. Look at my gallery as an example. (Also, to hernextmeal, you can click the "expand" link so you don't have to read it in a little box.)

[hernextmeal]

While RTF sometimes fails to upload, and .docx sometimes has display issues, the old .doc format has never failed me, has no formatting issues (does not trigger a horizontal scrollbar), and displays beautifully on mobile. Look at my gallery as an example. (Also, to hernextmeal, you can click the "expand" link so you don't have to read it in a little box.)

The expand link doesn't make it fit the screen. It just makes the box bigger, but there are always huge margins on the sides which leaves far too little room for the actual content. On your gallery, literally half the width of the screen is margin for me.

If I really really wanted to avoid downloading I could manually type view-source: in the url bar, find the source url for the iframe, and copy and paste that into the url bar, and then enable reader mode but it's way less hassle to just download the stories.

[Cruich]

The expand link doesn't make it fit the screen. It just makes the box bigger, but there are always huge margins on the sides which leaves far too little room for the actual content. On your gallery, literally half the width of the screen is margin for me.
If I really really wanted to avoid downloading I could manually type view-source: in the url bar, find the source url for the iframe, and copy and paste that into the url bar, and then enable reader mode but it's way less hassle to just download the stories.

You could also use a mobile browser like I use, where you can zoom in on any block of text, including the stories here, and it reflows the text to fill the screen, without huge margins.

[rugosian]

I do my composition primarily in Apple Pages, so my iCloud can move it from device to device. Native .pages format is not supported at all.

When I tried exporting from Pages to RTF, the RTF parser in g4 rejected it. I guess the RTF flavor of that export isn’t quite compatible with MSOffice RTF exports.

Exporting from Pages to DOCX was also a bust. The upload was accepted but in-site rendering completely failed. The download is fine, but the web page view is blank white empty.

EPUB support would be ideal, but it’s not there.

Kinda frustrated. I don’t love the extra work of trying to run my work through a Microsoft licensed product in order to get RTF that’s compatible, or to get to the old .DOC format that reportedly works better.

In case a mod reads this, here’s the RTF import error:

Code: Select all

Fatal Error
Error: Call to a member function toStyle() on null in /home/aryion/public_html/g4/lib/thirdparty/vendor/henck/rtf-to-html/src/Html/State.php:89
Stack trace:
#0 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/lib/thirdparty/vendor/henck/rtf-to-html/src/Html/HtmlFormatter.php(453): RtfHtmlPhp\Html\State->PrintStyle()
#1 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/lib/thirdparty/vendor/henck/rtf-to-html/src/Html/HtmlFormatter.php(531): RtfHtmlPhp\Html\HtmlFormatter->Write('The Eating Cont...')
#2 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/lib/thirdparty/vendor/henck/rtf-to-html/src/Html/HtmlFormatter.php(261): RtfHtmlPhp\Html\HtmlFormatter->FormatText(Object(RtfHtmlPhp\Text))
#3 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/lib/thirdparty/vendor/henck/rtf-to-html/src/Html/HtmlFormatter.php(237): RtfHtmlPhp\Html\HtmlFormatter->FormatEntry(Object(RtfHtmlPhp\Text))
#4 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/lib/thirdparty/vendor/henck/rtf-to-html/src/Html/HtmlFormatter.php(49): RtfHtmlPhp\Html\HtmlFormatter->ProcessGroup(Object(RtfHtmlPhp\Group))
#5 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/itemaction.php(668): RtfHtmlPhp\Html\HtmlFormatter->Format(Object(RtfHtmlPhp\Document))
#6 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/itemaction.php(434): setItemFile(Object(GalleryUser), 1003617, Array)
#7 /home/aryion/public_html/g4/itemaction.php(269): addNewItem(Object(GalleryUser), 1002536, 'Test upload', 'Test', Array, 'ALL', 'BLACK', true)
#8 {main}


[IvesBentonEaton]

The best format for the G4 gallery software Eka’s Portal employs is Microsoft Word 97/2000/2003 format—.DOC as opposed to the later .DOCX format. The .DOC format paragraph formatting, fonts, font coloring, and (to a limited extent) in-line graphics all work on G4, and work properly on mobile devices as well.

You can also expert to Adobe .PDF format, but this is less than ideal, especially on mobile devices.

Perhaps the best option would be to export to .DOCX, open it under LibreOffice (there are a couple of MacOS versions, all free), then export it to .DOC format. Admittedly, the extra step is annoying, but it should work. You may eventually decide to simply write content for Eka's under LibreOffice.

[rugosian]

The best format for the G4 gallery software Eka’s Portal employs is Microsoft Word 97/2000/2003 format—.DOC as opposed to the later .DOCX format. The .DOC format paragraph formatting, fonts, font coloring, and (to a limited extent) in-line graphics all work on G4, and work properly on mobile devices as well.

You can also expert to Adobe .PDF format, but this is less than ideal, especially on mobile devices.

Perhaps the best option would be to export to .DOCX, open it under LibreOffice (there are a couple of MacOS versions, all free), then export it to .DOC format. Admittedly, the extra step is annoying, but it should work. You may eventually decide to simply write content for Eka's under LibreOffice.

Thank you! This worked very well.